The present invention relates to diagnosing problems in a processor which occur during an operating system boot.
A significant area of concern in the computer industry involves how best to provide for management of computers, including, for example, providing maintenance. A big problem with personal computers (PCs) today is that they are perceived to be hard to use by a majority of non-PC owners (and even many PC owners). In one particular example, when PCs have problems, they produce cryptic behavior and require a high level of expertise to fix. One of the ways ease of use can be improved on PCs is to make them either self-diagnosing or to enable them to be diagnosed remotely by a support technician.
In the past, it has been common to provide service contracts for personal visits by repair personnel to maintain and repair computer equipment. Obviously, this is an expensive and time consuming approach.
Accordingly, significant efforts have been made toward providing remote management for computers to eliminate the need for such personal service calls.
In Local-Area-Networks (LANs), systems such as the Intel Wired-for-Manageability (WfM) have been developed to perform diagnosis and repair without the need for personal service calls. However, such systems are generally not readily adaptable to so-called xe2x80x9coccasionally connectedxe2x80x9d computers (e.g., consumer personal computers (PCs), corporate desktops in remote branch offices, unattended servers in branch offices, mobile platforms, etc.). In the past, such occasionally connected computers have been remotely serviced and/or updated by connection over a public network, such as the Internet. However, such remote management operations require the operating system of the computer to be booted in order to establish a modem connection over the network. In many cases, this is impractical because the nature of the problem which the computer is experiencing occurs during the boot process and prevents booting the operating system. Accordingly, a significant need exists for an arrangement that can permit diagnosis and repair of a processor without the requirement for an operating system boot, especially in the area of occasionally connected computers.
U.S. Ser. No. 09/221,575 filed by David C. Stewart, one of the co-inventors of the present application, on Dec. 29, 1998 discloses a method and apparatus which permits establishing a network connection for a processor without an operating system boot. In this arrangement, pre-boot services are loaded into a volatile memory of the processor from a nonvolatile memory. These pre-boot services include code for a modem driver. The modem driver code is then used to establish the network connection. This permits remote diagnosis and repair (as well as updating) even when the processor will not boot, not only in Local-Area-Networks (LANs) such as the Intel Wired-for-Manageability (WfM), but also in the so-called xe2x80x9coccasionally connectedxe2x80x9d computers. As such, the arrangement disclosed in Ser. No. 09/221,575 provides a good starting point for developing methods and systems that are capable of both self-diagnosis and remote repair functions. The present invention is directed to further developments of the disclosure set forth in Ser. No. 09/221,575.
A method and apparatus is provided in accordance with the present invention to provide diagnosis of the processor. To this end, a boot operation is begun and a Power-On-Self-Test (POST) operation is run as part of the boot operation. During the POST operation, failures in the POST operation are detected. Information is then stored about such failures, and the processor is rebooted. During the reboot operation, the stored information of the prior POST failure is then used for diagnosis.